This means that the winsurf board and sails brand / size used during olympic racing are all the same

Shouldn't it be also "One design" rules for kitesurfing racing in the Olympics?

Every competitor on the exact same board and exact same kite

All of sailing at the Olympics is on one-design equipment. That makes for fair competition for sure, but at the rate that gear evolves, that means that the stuff they compete on is obsolete by the time the Games come around... That's not a problem for Lasers, but for windsurfing and kite racing, that's an issue. The RS:X they just competed on was designed in 2004! Can you picture kiters in 2020 competing on today's kite racing gear???

Not sure who the kitesurfer was, bu
t it should have been a windsurfer[/quote]
I think the kitesurfer was a certain Mr John Kerry.

It just shows that few people can tell the difference.[/quote]

I misunderstood your point and didn't realize Kerry had taken up kitesurfing (good for him!). They must have searched for an image of Kerry windsurfing and taken that one, not realizing the difference. It's funny, because the attack ad the Republicans ran back then prominently featured the sail tacking one way, and then the other, which is kind of hard to confuse with a kiteboarder.

gmb13 wrote:Markus, Gebi and Bruno all probably windsurf better than they kite. They may not be pro-windsurf, but neither are they against it.

They may not be pro-windsurf, but isn't the problem rather the fact that they're pro-kites?

gmb13 wrote:I think it is better to have someone writing the report who has no vested interest in Kiting. Neither of the 3 had any vested interest in pushing Kiting... Kiting "experts" have their own biases and would not have been taken seriously.

gmb13 wrote:Markus, Gebi and Bruno all probably windsurf better than they kite. They may not be pro-windsurf, but neither are they against it.

They may not be pro-windsurf, but isn't the problem rather the fact that they're pro-kites?

gmb13 wrote:I think it is better to have someone writing the report who has no vested interest in Kiting. Neither of the 3 had any vested interest in pushing Kiting... Kiting "experts" have their own biases and would not have been taken seriously.

Exactly!

None of those three have much to gain from Kitesurfing becoming Olympic other than even more Work they have to do for free.

There were some grumpy competitors at the Olympics because they felt that there was too much variation between the supplied RSX boards. Lots of fin breakages too though I don't know if that was part of the standard supplied kit. Maybe RSX would still be in the Olympics if the gear had been lighter, cheaper and faster. If Neil Pryde is aggrieved they might look at what they could have done better. Hopefully they will learn from their mistakes for Cabrinha kite racing gear.

SimonP wrote:There were some grumpy competitors at the Olympics because they felt that there was too much variation between the supplied RSX boards.

Yes, I've read that too. But didn't they get their gear something like two weeks in advance, with the option to change any of it if they didn't like it (or 'accidentally' broke it)? In the end, the usual suspects were on top of the leaderboard anyway, so it doesn't seem that 'variations' in gear performance had any effect on the results...